Duck-Duck-Goose and Beyond - How I "got into play"

I started out playing with children. More than 30 years ago, actually. I had a Master's in Theater and was hired by the School District of Philadelphia to write a curriculum in children's theater. I was working with inner-city children between the ages of 5-11, most of whom were sent to us because they were someone else's behavior problem.

I very much wanted to help the kids create some kind of theater experience that they found meaningful, relevant, and, most importantly, fun. My single criterion for success was - if I walked out of the room for two minutes, would the kids be doing the same thing when I came back.

It was really the only way I could think of to be sure that they were doing it for themselves, and not for a grade or for me. This was a very tough test for my understanding of what it meant to teach theater. Nothing I tried really worked. They didn't warm-up to the warm-ups. They were too skittish for the skits. O, they were polite. And they'd do what I asked. But nothing clicked. Eventually, I unearthed my Viola Spolin book (Improvisation for the Theater) and tried some of her theater games. They were enthusiastic about the game part. But the moment I stepped out of the room, chaos ensued in all its many chaotic glories.

Finally, out of desperation, I asked them if there were anything at all that they actually wanted to play together. "Yes," they chorused, "a game." A game. Not a theater game. Just a plain, silly kids game. "You know," they appended, "like Duck-Duck-Goose." "Duck-Duck-Goose"? Oh. That's the game where everyone sits in a circle and one kid, the Goose, taps each kid on the head and says "Duck" until she reaches the one kid she wants to get chased by. She calls the kid "Goose." The Goose stands up and gives chase. If tagged by the Goose before getting to the Goose's vacated seat, she has to start over again. If not tagged, the kid that got Goosed is now IT.

It struck me as a silly game, with really no relevance to the higher dramatic arts. But a deal is a deal. So we played. And after a while, I walked out, and after another while, I came back in. And they were still playing! So, I joined in. And had fun with them. And learned from them. And discovered that this was in deed a kind of theater we were playing with. For us Ducks, it was all about looking like you wanted to get chosen (or not). Too enthusiastic or blasˇ, and you stay a Duck forever. Theater of an unerringly real kind.

Two years later, I had compiled a curriculum of children's games. Over a thousand of them. In five lovely volumes. Each game coded so that a teacher could find a game that was similar enough to the game their kids liked, or different enough, so that a kind of gamish dialogue could be pursued, the kids following their own path towards more and more sophisticated, or downright silly explorations of self vs. other.

Now that the curriculum was completed and its benefits researched and documented, the teacher training began. This was my turning point.

The very first training session. I had a list of some eight games that typified children's game preferences at different stages of their play explorations. My intention was to play each of these games for a few minutes - just enough so that the teachers would get some working insights into the dynamics of play and the elegance of each game as a relevant social platform for the exploration of character and community. I started with Duck-Duck-Goose. Forty-five minutes later, they were still playing Duck-Duck-Goose. Despite my many mumbled protestations. Despite my repeated urgings for them to get an intellectual grip on themselves and the process, they were having too much fun to stop.

Clearly the game was as relevant to their social and personal needs as it was to the kids. In fact, perhaps more relevant.

I learned then that we as adults are even more play-deprived than we were as kids. I learned that trying to get adults to lead kids into meaningful play meant that I first had to give them the opportunity to rediscover the meaning themselves, as adults. I learned that the reason adults tend to so thoroughly disregard the relevance of play to child growth and development is that they have so systematically been denied the opportunity to discover the relevance of play to adult growth and development.

I bought a farm and called it "The Games Preserve." I converted a bank barn into the ultimate adult playroom - hundreds of games and puzzles, air hockey, table tennis, billiards, pinball, flying rings. I ran workshops for teachers and therapists, prison guards and personal growth seekers. Later, I joined the New Games Foundation and developed the New Games Training Program - a program that reached thousands of adults and maybe even you. Today, I teach courses for adults, exploring the depths and heights of fun. I teach them everywhere I can. My favorite venue - the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

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